Dakota Marshal

by Jenna Ryan

  Poetry? She struggled to think. “What if you’re wrong about what your sister wants?”

  Doubt flickered in his eyes, but he brushed it off. “Doesn’t matter if I’m wrong. Point is, I get away, everything’s cool. McBride stays on my tail, Eddie stays on his.”

  “So Eddie’ll just go away if McBride backs off?”

  “Yeah. Eventually. Okay, sure, he’ll be pissed, but when a new job comes along, he’ll forget about McBride and go with the cash. And we’re back to everyone wins.”

  The café door opened. Rory’s head snapped around. Cursing, he tossed Alessandra aside and bolted. She heard a shocked “What the hell…?” and glimpsed the teenage boy fumbling with his fly as he leaned against the door.

  Here was the reason, she thought through a haze, the raw bones of why she and McBride had split. In his out of control world, a train wreck like Rory Simms was no different than the bus crash that had almost ended her life.

  FOR THE SECOND time in as many days, McBride had to track Alessandra down in a rest-stop bathroom. He’d given her five minutes out of sight. That was three minutes longer than he’d intended, but some guy with a toothpick had been harassing one of the teenage girls, and he couldn’t pretend not to see it. Unfortunately, the guy had a surly nature, ham-size fists and a good dozen under his belt. He hadn’t backed down willingly.

  The bathroom doors read Hers and His. They both read Out of Order. Knowing Alessandra, he was about to nudge Hers open, anyway, when the boy he’d seen earlier stumbled in, flushed and cradling a bloody arm.

  “Guy’s a freak,” he exclaimed. “He was trying to get some ass in the back of that old van that used to be a chicken truck. Man, there’s hen crap all over the floor….”

  The boy kept going, but McBride was already out the back door.

  Alessandra plowed into his chest, more specifically into his injured shoulder. The impact had him seeing stars for a moment. He toughed it out, wrapped one hand around her arm and tipped her head up with the other. “Are you hurt? What happened?”

  She bunched his shirt and shook. “I’m not hurt. It was Rory. He ran when the kid came out. I don’t think he has a gun. He was holding a knife on me, McBride, a butter knife. He dropped it in the van before he took off.”

  McBride followed the direction of her eyes, but didn’t release her. “You need to be inside.”

  “What? No.” Having apparently gathered her wits, she shook him again. “McBride, Rory’s here. In Rosewater. At this rest stop. You’ll never get a better chance to catch him.”

  He felt the tearing in his gut.

  “Go.” She pushed him. “I’m not hurt. Get him.” When he still didn’t move, she made an exasperated sound. “If you won’t, I will.”

  He stopped her easily, angled her toward the door. “Go into the main room and stay there. Check out the kid. He’s bleeding. You’ve got my backup. If you see Rory before I do, use it.”

  He closed the café door himself, then drew his gun and started around the side of the building.

  In McBride’s mind Rory’s big ugly face got bigger and uglier the farther he ran. The bastard had put his hands on Alessandra. He’d pay for that, along with everything else. Rape wasn’t Rory’s deal as far as McBride knew, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t stoop to it under the right circumstances and in a particularly nasty frame of mind.

  A hundred yards ahead, he emerged in a clearing rimmed with trees and scraggly bushes. Beyond it stood another cornfield.

  He slowed, scanned, listened.

  Birds and insects chirped, buzzed and hummed. The sun blazed overhead. Dry cornstalks rustled. He smelled dust in the air and the pungent odor of diesel fuel.

  But nothing human stirred.

  McBride’s gaze went to the only visible road. He was heading toward it when someone inside the café screamed.

  Chapter Nine

  “It’s a scratch.” Alessandra used her calm, professional tone to soothe the screaming girl. “A deep one, but nothing to worry about.”

  The injured boy, pale and trembling from mild shock, nodded. The girl with him alternated between teary hyperventilation and fearful gulping whimpers.

  “There’s so much blood,” she warbled. “And I see bone…”

  Her eyes rolled back, and she hit the floor at the feet of her frightened friends. The cook marched over. Emitting a tsk of disgust, she stabbed the air with her spatula.

  “Bonnie Lynn, you pick yourself up and stop being such a drama queen. Your daddy’s a butcher, God’s sake. And you, boy, you let the lady doc here do what’s necessary so we can all get back to eatin’.” A slamming door halted her tirade. “Well, hello there again, cutie.”

  Alessandra looked up to find McBride leaning against the doorframe watching them. He was alone, so he hadn’t caught Rory. She recognized the glint of annoyance in his eyes.

  “Got away, huh?” Alessandra asked as she returned to deal with the boy’s arm. The long abrasion showed a little fat but no bone.

  Pushing off, McBride gave the toothpick man a steady look and the boy’s abrasion a glance. “I imagine his vehicle was parked in the bushes next to the gas station.” He nodded toward the boy. “Will this take long?”

  “Ten minutes. There’s a doctor in town, so I’m not going to stitch, only wrap. He cut it on a piece of metal when Ro—the guy who grabbed me knocked him down.” She heard a soft beep in her shoulder bag. “Incoming text, McBride.”

  “Burger and fries coming up,” the cook promised with a flirty smile. “On the house and smothered in my special gravy.”

  Alessandra was tying a knot in the gauze when McBride caught her eye.

  “Make it a fast cleanup, darlin’. We still have some driving to do, and a mystery to work on as we go.”

  “You’ll live,” she told the boy. “But get to your doctor as soon as possible… What?” she asked McBride, who was perched in a deceptively easy manner on one of the high counter stools.

  He angled the BlackBerry so she could see Larry’s message.

  It read: Me and Morley found the body of Edward Louis Rickard five miles from town. Looks like he bled to death in his truck. Doc Dyer recognized the bullet straight off. ELR was shot and killed by someone using a high-powered rifle….

  “SO, EDDIE, AKA Edward Louis Rickard, is dead,” Alessandra stated. “I know this sounds callous, but whether his agenda was to kill you so he could bring Rory back to his sister, or kill you so Rory could get away, the fact is, for us, it’s a major problem solved. Rory’s a different story. Whatever he knows or doesn’t know, hears or doesn’t hear, isn’t it a little crazy to think he’d still be heading for Loden?” She clamped both hands on the dash as they blew past an eighteen-wheeler. “God, McBride, slow down.”

  Ruts and potholes were no longer a concern. Right now, it was all about speed. McBride had Moe’s truck flying along the interstate. At best, she’d describe the current landscape as a brown blur.

  “He’s trying to outthink us, Alessandra.”

  “By going where we expect him to go.”

  “Which, in his mind, is the last place he’d expect us to look for him.”

  She made a leapfrog motion with her index finger. “Logically speaking, wouldn’t he be farther ahead to scratch Billy from the contact list regardless of what he thinks we’re thinking, and move on to whoever’s next in line?”

  “Logically speaking, yes. But he exposed himself to you when there was no need for it. That’s desperation. Rory might or might not hear about Eddie—probably won’t, given his current state of panic—but either way, my money’s on Loden and his limited talent for reverse psychology.”

  Since she didn’t know enough about the man to argue, Alessandra pried her hands off the dash and sat cautiously back. Another round of local country music allowed her to check out her neglected weekend emails rather than the road or McBride.

  She’d already opened everything from Joan and Larry. Medical supply companies could wait. A pair of f
riends in Rapid City wanted to do a girls’ night before Labor Day. Several people had sent pictures of their healthy or convalescing pets. She received thank-you cards, animated happy faces and one exploding heart that rained love and meows over the screen.

  Two dinner invitations followed, from men whose faces she couldn’t bring to mind. Made sense since she was sitting next to the reason why.

  So shallow, she thought. Or at least she thought she’d merely thought it. The upward tilt of McBride’s lips suggested the words had actually slipped out.

  “I hope you’re not talking about me.”

  “I wish, but no. Though I often wonder how my life would have gone if I’d married Toby, the boy next door, and settled into the farming lifestyle.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes.” Then her mind formed a picture. “No.” She scrolled through more messages on her BlackBerry. “I don’t know. Maybe. Sometimes. When you’re on my mind and making me crazy.”

  His smile widened. “I still do that?”

  “Even excluding our current situation, yes, you do.”

  “You’re going back to that death wish you think I have, aren’t you?”

  “In a sense. And I don’t think, McBride, I know. I can’t count the number of times during our marriage that you dragged yourself through the door, bruised and battered and unwilling to tell me why.”

  “I didn’t want to bring the ugly aspect of my work home to you.”

  “Right, just your bruised and battered body. Where’s the problem in that? I should just ignore it, and your black hole of a mood, and go out for dinner with you. Because food eaten in a noisy bistro where conversation is virtually impossible is the answer to all our communication problems. And life rolls on. Until the day you don’t come home all messed up and moody, because you just plain don’t come home at all, and the next time I see you, you’re lying on a slab in the morgue, and I have no idea why.” On a roll, she tapped another email open and made an irritated sound. “I hate it when people do that.”

  “What? Don’t come home or end up in the morgue?”

  Although she was tempted to hiss at him—and herself as well for venting so much without any real provocation—she merely took a deep breath. “YAMAN wants to be my Facebook friend.”

  “Sounds Jamaican.”

  Okay, that was worth a smothered laugh.

  “Is there a message?” he asked.

  “YAMAN says we share a common bond, a powerful one. He—or she—wants to know if I’m intrigued enough to learn more, dot, dot, dot.”

  “Are you?”

  “Not right now… Oh… Hmm.” She cocked her head. “He sent me another message.” A slithery sensation crawled through her. “Why does that creep me out?”

  “Because it makes him seem like a stalker.”

  “Unless it’s a woman, which takes us back to— Whoa!” She reared back. “This is not good.”

  He shot her a sideways look. “What?”

  “A bad joke, I hope. Really hope. It says, You’re ignoring me, Dr. Norris. That’s not how the game is played. The loss I suffered because of you will not go unpunished. You’ll pay in kind. A death for a death. Be forewarned. YAMAN.”

  Fear prickled her skin as she rescanned the text. “Be forewarned,” she repeated, then felt her blood turn to ice. “Crap, McBride. The second message was sent yesterday afternoon.” She met his eyes. “Before the shoot-out at the motel.”

  MCBRIDE HAD A HARD time believing that anyone would want to hurt Alessandra, let alone kill her. But a death for a death? Predicted hours before a three-way shoot-out at a small town motel? A shoot-out that shouldn’t have gone down the way it had. No matter how he reworked the bottom line, Casey Simms had sent her favorite sniper after McBride, and she wasn’t one to waste either money or manpower. The rifle guy was unlikely to have been dispatched by her.

  On the flipside, coincidences happened, more often than people thought. A hotheaded breeder who’d lost a prize bull might be angry enough and stupid enough to take that step into the abyss, especially after his attempt to ambush the person he deemed responsible for the loss had been thwarted. Add in copious amounts of alcohol, which Alessandra said the man was known to imbibe, and you had nitro walking. But coming after Alessandra with an assault rifle?

  No matter how many times he ran it, that scenario didn’t play, either. The threat part, possibly. The rifle attack, no.

  Although it took her the better part of an hour to get there, Alessandra finally came around. Sort of.

  “All right.” She folded her arms across her chest, a defiant gesture he recognized well. “Let’s go strictly with the facts for now. Any way you look at it, the time aspect is freaky. YAMAN’s second email was sent early in the afternoon. Rifle shots were fired at night. Those shots were fired with Eddie there and firing, too.”

  McBride slowed Moe’s black truck as they approached the town of Loden, Wyoming, population six hundred and eighty-eight. A sign on the sparsely treed outskirts proclaimed the one hundred and seventy-fifth anniversary celebration was in full swing. It would be a week of parades, fireworks, entertainment and barbecues. Main Street would be closed to traffic during the event, and a temporary visitors’ bureau had been set up in the sheriff’s office.

  He followed the hand-painted detour signs. “I’m no expert, Alessandra, but I might be able to trace those emails.”

  She regarded him through her lashes. “At the risk of sounding pessimistic, I thought you had trust issues with the people in your office.”

  He grinned. “What, you think I haven’t picked up any skills over the years?”

  “I can envision several, but I wouldn’t have put computer hacking among them.” She watched a pickup filled with wooden crates behind them via the side mirror. “Larry said Eddie was killed by a rifle bullet.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Nothing. It was just a statement. And, I admit, a niggle that won’t go away. Part of me thinks YAMAN could be Frank Hawley. He’s obsessive about his livestock and his bulls in particular. He has a vicious temper. He also has a son-in-law named Ryder.” She stuck her sunglasses on top of her head and unplugged her BlackBerry from the lighter to check the charge. “Ryder used to be in the military. Now he works with Hawley.”

  “Breeding bulls?”

  “Training horses. On his own ranch, which is adjacent to his father-in-law’s. But they’re tight, and Ryder loves to drink and fight.”

  “To excess?”

  “I suppose that would depend on your definition.” She waited a beat, then added, “He’s come on to me more than once since I started working at the clinic.”

  McBride understood and accepted the jealous gremlin that sank its claws into his heart, but the suspicion had no real place in his former-cop mind. In spite of that, he narrowed his eyes. “What exactly did ‘coming on to you’ entail?”

  “Pretty much what you’d think—nice dinner, decent club, lots of drinking, hot sex.”

  Something dark and unpleasant churned in McBride’s belly. “You had hot sex with a married man?”

  Her lips moved into an ingenuous smile. “Are you asking as Marshal McBride or the man from whom I’m legally separated?”

  “I’m trying to remain impartial as both. Why don’t we go back to ‘Ryder loves to drink and fight,’ and see where that takes us.”

  “I didn’t do any of those things with him, McBride. All I said was that he asked me. And—okay, not married—but you came on to me once or twice yourself, you know.”

  Now the look he slanted her had a wry edge. “You’re not going to let this go, are you?”

  “Come to think of it, so did the bus driver.”

  “The bus-crash driver? You never told me that.”

  Amusement flitted across her face. “He was a jerk, and I was just one of several females he tried to move on. My turn came at the first rest stop. The woman sitting across from me at the beginning of the trip—the one who wound up with a bro
ken leg and a concussion—was number two. The blonde from Arizona came in at number three. And right before we went into the skid, I saw him talking to a sheet welder named Georgia.”

  Her gaze got distracted by a swooping, soaring hawk in the distance. “I heard Georgia died a month or so after the crash. The blonde didn’t make it out of the bus.”

  “I saw the blonde. Impaled by a piece of glass. How did Georgia die?”

  “Not sure. I only know her death was unrelated to the accident. All I really wanted to do was shove the entire thing to the back of my mind and get on with living.”

  Even more so after she’d watched her seatmate die from massive internal injuries.

  “You know,” she mused, still tracking the hawk, “the irony is there’s not one part of that trip I can’t recall with vivid clarity. The before and a lot of the after is fuzzy, but that long string of hours never fades. The roll went on forever. So did the screaming. I can smell the fuel, see electrical wires sparking, hear people crying. There was so much blood, and God, I was so scared.”

  She’d handled it, though, McBride recalled. She’d gone deep, patched the cracks and dealt with the aftermath.

  “I wasn’t supposed to be sitting so far back,” she continued. “And suddenly, after the roll, there was no way forward. The guy beside me was pinned under an overhead compartment that tore loose and I knew, somehow, that no matter how quickly help arrived, he wasn’t going to live. Maybe neither of us were. It was…” She paused, frowned, then let out a deep whoosh of breath. “Wow. I really went off on a tangent there, didn’t I? From ‘the driver came on to me’ to the part, or almost to the part, where I saw your face for the first time.” She rested her head on the seat back. “My mother would have called our meeting fate. My father called it a judgment. Not the harshest one in my case, because, while I wasn’t the most obedient daughter, I wasn’t a really bad one, either.”